Daughter of Holocaust Survivors

Tells the story of her mother's survival following the Nazi invasion of Jablonow, Poland

Author of children's book written to memorialize her mother's life

Grace Kalfus is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Frieda Kalfus (née Dulberg) and Chaim (Harry) Kalfus. Grace tells the story of her mother who was born in Jablonow, Poland in 1923. Frieda’s life changed in 1939 when Hitler signed a non-aggression pact giving Frieda’s town and the eastern part of Poland to Russia. Her life was even more dramatically altered in 1941 when the Nazis invaded this area and the Russians ran East. Frieda was separated from her family at this time and traveled to Uzbekistan.

She returned to Poland in 1945 with a husband she married in order to survive, and she was unable to find her parents or her sisters or what had happened to them. Frieda became a mother to her husband’s niece who had been hidden with a Gentile family, and the three of them live in a displaced person’s camp for several years prior to emigrating to America. Frieda, wanting more from her life than this marriage of convenience, obtained a divorce and later married Grace’s father, who was born in Tarnow, Poland; together they created their own family.

Grace presents her mother’s story to honor her memory and to share Frieda’s kindness, courage, and strength which have guided her own family and which serve as a lesson to us all.

Grace was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, New York, spending summers with her family in the bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York. She lives in New Rochelle with her husband and her miniature poodle Clover; Grace’s two adult daughters live fairly close by. Grace is a founding partner at Child Behavior Therapy Associates, LLP, and received her PhD and MA from West Virginia University in Clinical Psychology and her BA from Binghamton University.

Grace has written, and privately published for her family, a children’s picture book to memorialize the love and dedication her mother bestowed on both her own children and her grandchildren called Loving Bubby.

Grace a member of GenerationsForward, a group of second and third generation individuals sponsored by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center of White Plains, New York.

To download an editable flyer, CLICK HERE